This thesis doesn’t test a particular hypothesis, yet the literature review is an important aspect of any process. At times incidentally and other times explicitly, my research has been motivated by the methodological approach of grounded theory. Grounded theory requires a researcher to develop categories from empirical data, identifies additional data along the categories and tells a story around a “central phenomenon” being investigated (Creswell, 2007). As described by Dunne (2011), there is a robust debate over the role of literature among researchers who employ grounded theory. In this approach, theories generated from empirical data are privileged over existing theoretical frameworks, and such a literature review can prevent an unfettered discovery process (Glaser & Strauss, 2012). In conducting my research, I have continued to review literature after the initial research proposal. This allows my research to have a non-trivial degree of breadth, and the expectation of comprehensiveness when conducting research in community development where economics, public policy, psychology, building systems and demography may all bear on the subject at hand.

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